Best Ever
Survival Horror Game?

The first Ganado you encounter in Resident Evil 4 takes a hatchet to the face and keeps coming. This isn’t a zombie—it’s faster, smarter, capable of flanking, and when you finally put it down, you realize the rules have changed. The fixed camera angles that defined survival horror for a decade are gone. The tank controls that made combat deliberately awkward are refined into something responsive. The inventory management that prioritized scarcity now balances limitation against genuine tactical choice. Everything that made Resident Evil feel like Resident Evil has been reconsidered from first principles.

Director Shinji Mikami had helped create the survival horror genre with the original 1996 Resident Evil and had watched his creation calcify into formula across sequels that repeated rather than evolved. By 2005, the franchise needed either reinvention or retirement. Mikami chose violence: he threw out the zombies, the mansion settings, the puzzle-box level design, and started over with a simple question. What if the horror came not from being underpowered but from being overwhelmed?

The answer plays out across Leon Kennedy’s mission to rescue the president’s daughter from a cult in rural Spain. The Ganados—villagers infected by a mind-controlling parasite called Las Plagas—attack in groups, coordinate their movements, use weapons, and keep coming until you’ve depleted resources you can’t easily replace. The over-the-shoulder camera that Mikami’s team developed (and that every third-person shooter since has adopted) creates a perspective that’s simultaneously empowering and claustrophobic. You can see what you’re aiming at. You can’t see what’s behind you.

The level design exploits this vulnerability systematically. The village sequence that opens the game—ten minutes of escalating siege, culminating in a chainsaw-wielding enemy whose one-hit kill potential reshapes every tactical decision—functions as both tutorial and statement of intent. The castle that follows introduces new enemy types, new environmental hazards, new resource calculations. The island that concludes the campaign cranks the military-industrial aesthetic until the horror becomes action-movie catharsis. Each section teaches mechanics that subsequent sections complicate.

The merchant system—that strange, ever-present figure who’ll “buy it at a high price”—transforms resource management from survival into economy. You’re not just finding ammunition; you’re investing in weapons, choosing upgrade paths, making decisions about loadout that persist across the campaign. The attaché case inventory, a grid where items must be rotated and arranged like Tetris pieces, turns organization into its own small puzzle. These systems create the illusion of control, which makes the moments when control fails—the chainsaw connects, the ammunition runs dry, the crowd closes in—all the more effective.

The boss encounters understand pacing. Del Lago, the lake monster fought from a motorboat in the campaign’s early hours, creates spectacle before the systems are fully established. Krauser, the knife-fight specialist, tests close-quarters skills developed across hours of shooting. Saddler, the final confrontation, throws everything at you simultaneously, demanding mastery of every mechanic the game has introduced. None of these fights feel unfair; all of them feel like examinations.

The game’s influence is almost impossible to overstate. Gears of War took the over-the-shoulder camera and cover-based spacing. Dead Space took the limb-targeting and strategic dismemberment. The Last of Us took the resource scarcity and companion dynamics. The entire shape of third-person action games for the following decade derives from choices Mikami’s team made in 2005. Even Resident Evil itself couldn’t escape: subsequent entries oscillated between chasing this game’s success and trying to return to roots it had permanently disturbed.

The 2023 remake, developed by a different team, updates graphics and mechanics while preserving the original’s structure. It’s excellent—a respectful modernization that understands what worked. But playing the 2005 version reveals something the remake can’t replicate: the shock of the new, the sense that established rules were being broken in real time. The GameCube original, played on a CRT television, has a particular grain and darkness that the HD versions smooth away. The design decisions that would become industry standard were, in 2005, genuinely surprising.

Leon Kennedy entered that village expecting zombies and found something worse: enemies that could think, adapt, surround. Resident Evil 4 did the same thing to its genre. It looked at survival horror’s conventions, decided they’d become comfortable, and replaced comfort with a relentless, exhilarating hostility. The franchise hasn’t stopped burning since.

Decide for Yourself:

• The 2023 remake is the most accessible entry point—rebuilt from the ground up with modern graphics, refined controls, and expanded content that deepens the original’s best ideas.
• The HD remaster of the 2005 original preserves Mikami’s specific vision with improved resolution but otherwise faithful presentation.
• For historical context, the original GameCube release represents the game as it first appeared—before ports added content, before HD smoothed the textures.